Amazon is a Firestarter

Amazon was all the buzz today with their Kindle press event today. They certainly started a fire with the release of the Kindle Fire as well as the three other Kindle models today. The press event started at 10:00 ET this morning and gave us the release of these new Kindle models. We found ourselves looking at new Kindle touch in both Wi-fi and 3G versions. This model has the same e-ink screen as the basic kindle, has no buttons and comes in at 6 inches. There was also a new base kindle model. Amazon is claiming it is faster, 30% lighter and 18% smaller than the previous model, but still sports a 6 inch e-ink screen. Of course special offers are available in these models.

The real star of the show though was the Kindle Fire. This was the talked about Android tablet that people said could be real iPad competition. The Fire comes in at 7 inches with an IPS screen (1024 x 600, 16 million colors) and weighs 14.6 ounces. It also has a dual-core processor, Wi-fi, 8 Gb of on-board storage and up to 8 hours of battery life. It utilizes Amazon Cloud Storage, has access to their app store for games and other app, has a custom e-mail app, access to the MP3 store for music and of course uses the Kindle store. I think one of the coolest features is the new Amazon Silk branded web browser. They claim that it is faster than other mobile web browsers because it intelligently decides whether or not it should render material in the cloud or on the device.

Is in an iPad killer? I’m not sure. The price (see below) is surely much better than the iPad. It’s form factor is different, 7 inches vs. 10 inches and it runs on a non-Honeycomb version of Android. That being said I think it’s pretty cool and I may just buy one. It’s not going to replace my iPad and clearly this won’t be a logical purchase. I just like gadgets. When I buy one I’ll write about it.